


the ballad of a dove

by anakinleias



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Other, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5960215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anakinleias/pseuds/anakinleias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully ponders life, death, love and family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the ballad of a dove

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be something else entirely, I don't know what happened. Consider it a half assed attempt at writing again. All mistakes are mine, please excuse this barely-edited late night post episode word vomit.

A Mother's love is something  
that no one can explain,  
It is made of deep devotion  
and of sacrifice and pain,  
It is endless and unselfish  
and enduring come what may  
For nothing can destroy it  
or take that love away 

—Helen Steiner Rice

 

She knew this moment would come someday. Dying is the only guarantee we have in life, and immortality jokes aside, after everything she’d been through, surely her time would be up soon. After all, one can only bury so many loved ones in their lifetime.

Scully stares at the shoreline, the vastness of the sea upon which her mother’s ashes now wash away to meet her eternal lover, the ocean giving everything a larger than life meaning, and realizes this is how it’s supposed to be. _Mothers aren’t meant to bury their children._  


It is nature’s cruel joke to reverse the order; she remembers the anger stewing inside of her when she lost Melissa. She had not yet been a mother, had not yet created and nurtured a human being entirely different from herself, couldn’t understand a parent’s love. A mother’s love. The urge to do whatever it takes, to sacrifice everything and everyone —including yourself— to keep that your child alive.

She finally understood her mother’s pain, when she lost Emily. Child of her blood but not of her womb, she still loved and felt the loss just as deeply as she still grieves for William.

She’d been stunned to hear her mother ask for Charlie after being estranged for so many years. Now she understands the urge to reunite with your child, to see his face, hear his voice one last time before you go. She understands why her mother held on, and why she let go.  


All she can do now is hope: that Charlie has found some peace, that William is safe and happy, loved by his family as she had always intended for him to be with her. That her mother is in a better place, reunited with Ahab and Melissa (with Emily) at last. Hopes that one day she can find closure for herself, that someday she can find a way to be okay with not knowing.


End file.
